Use Font Awesome Icons in Css

Use Font Awesome Icons in CSS

You can't use text as a background image, but you can use the :before or :after pseudo classes to place a text character where you want it, without having to add all kinds of messy extra mark-up.

Be sure to set position:relative on your actual text wrapper for the positioning to work.

.mytextwithicon {
    position:relative;
}    
.mytextwithicon:before {
    content: "\25AE";  /* this is your text. You can also use UTF-8 character codes as I do here */
    font-family: FontAwesome;
    left:-5px;
    position:absolute;
    top:0;
 }

EDIT:

Font Awesome v5 uses other font names than older versions:

For FontAwesome v5, Free Version, use: font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Free"
For FontAwesome v5, Pro Version, use: font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Pro"

Note that you should set the same font-weight property, too (seems to be 900).

Another way to find the font name is to right click on a sample font awesome icon on your page and get the font name (same way the utf-8 icon code can be found, but note that you can find it out on :before).

how to use font awesome icons in HTML

First you have to write this in the head

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.0.0/css/all.min.css">

Then whenever you want to use a font awesome, Just copy its HTML code and paste it where you want it to be. for example:

<i class="fa-solid fa-c"></i>

how to use fontAwesome icon from css

You can use like this. I have updated your code.

ul li {  display: inline-block;}
.right {  float: right;}
button:after {  content: "\f067";  font-family: FontAwesome;    font-style: normal;    font-weight: normal;    text-decoration: inherit;    display: inline-block;    vertical-align: middle;    margin-left: 5px;}

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/4.7.0/css/font-awesome.min.css" />
<ul class="right">  <li><button>Note</button></li></ul><ul>  <li><a href="#"><i class="fa fa-user"></i></a></li>  <li><a href="#"><i class="fa fa-book"></i></a></li>  <li><a href="#"><i class="fa fa-cart-plus"></i></a></li></ul>

Use Font Awesome icon as CSS content

Update for FontAwesome 5
^{Thanks to Aurelien}

You need to change the font-family to Font Awesome 5 Brands OR Font Awesome 5 Free, based on the type of icon you are trying to render. Also, do not forget to declare font-weight: 900;

a:before {
   font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Free";
   content: "\f095";
   display: inline-block;
   padding-right: 3px;
   vertical-align: middle;
   font-weight: 900;
}

Demo

You can read the rest of the answer below to understand how it works and to know some workarounds for spacing between icon and the text.

FontAwesome 4 and below

That's the wrong way to use it. Open the font awesome style sheet, go to the class of the font you want to use say fa-phone, copy the content property under that class with the entity, and use it like:

a:before {
    font-family: FontAwesome;
    content: "\f095";
}

Demo

Just make sure that if you are looking to target a specific a tag, then consider using a class instead to make it more specific like:

a.class_name:before {
    font-family: FontAwesome;
    content: "\f095";
}

Using the way above will stick the icon with the remaining text of yours, so if you want to have a bit of space between the two of them, make it display: inline-block; and use some padding-right:

a:before {
    font-family: FontAwesome;
    content: "\f095";
    display: inline-block;
    padding-right: 3px;
    vertical-align: middle;
}

Extending this answer further, since many might be having a requirement to change an icon on hover, so for that, we can write a separate selector and rules for :hover action:

a:hover:before {
    content: "\f099"; /* Code of the icon you want to change on hover */
}

Demo

Now in the above example, icon nudges because of the different size and you surely don't want that, so you can set a fixed width on the base declaration like

a:before {
    /* Other properties here, look in the above code snippets */
    width: 12px; /* add some desired width here to prevent nudge */
}

Demo

How to use Font Awesome 6 icons?

To use the new Font Awesome 6, you can again use the CDN (if that's your preference) like the following.

<link rel="stylesheet" 
href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/6.2.0/css/all.min.css">

Then use icons like the following.

<i class="fa-solid fa-house"></i>

Use Font Awesome Icons in Css