Angular app styling unicode characters - css

Question

I've got a stackblitz Angular 5 app for implementing table sorting here - https://stackblitz.com/edit/angular-rxdzom. It's based on the code from http://www.carbonatethis.com/sort-table-columns-with-angular-and-typescript/. It uses an ./app/sortable-table/sortable-column.component.css with the contents:
.caret-up:before {
content: "\f0d8";
}
.caret-down:before {
content: "\f0d7";
}
and an ./app/sortable-table/sortable-column.component.html that contains two i tags that reference these with the class attribute. Instead of showing the caret-up and caret-down, it substitutes a rectangular box. If I replace caret-up and caret-down with the Font Awesome library, "fa fa-caret-up" and "fa fa-caret-down", it works properly. My environment at work doesn't use Font Awesome and it's not an option to add it, so I need to create the css content manually as I'm attempting above. Any help is appreciated!
I've tried researching this on my own, and clearly have something that looks like it should work, it just doesn't. I've used references like http://webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/how-to-add-icon-fonts-to-any-element-with-css that seem to indicate the css is valid, and I've tried using ".caret-up i::before" which also does not work. I'm clearly missing something or doing something wrong. I even tried adding
padding-right: 10px;
font-family: "FontAwesome";
before the content property but that didn't help either.

Answer 1

I assume the css shown above is in your styles property of your component? If so, the issue is that the backspace needs to be escaped in your string. Update them to the following and you should be good!
.caret-up:before {
content: "\\f0d8";
}
.caret-down:before {
content: "\\f0d7";
}

Answer 2

An alternative for adding icons is through material icons
You can find the icons here : https://material.io/icons/
Include the following link in your index.html
And in the css add the class 'material-icons' to your property.
For example-
keyboard_arrow_up
You can refer to different symbols name on the above material icons link provided.

Answer 3

Okay, so a part of this was me being in the dark about our environment. We had updated font awesome to Semantic UI, which uses a port of the font awesome fonts so I just had to use those fonts. To do it manually, I could use:
.caret-up:after {
padding-right: 10px;
font-family: Icons;
content: "\f0d8";
}
.caret-down:after {
padding-right: 10px;
font-family: Icons;
content: "\f0d7";
}
and to put the icons after the text, I just needed to move the "ng-content" tag above the "i" tags for asc/desc sort order. So, using the Semantic UI fonts, my sortable-column.component.html became:
<ng-content></ng-content>
<i class="caret up icon" *ngIf="sortDirection === 'asc'"></i>
<i class="caret down icon" *ngIf="sortDirection === 'desc'"></i>
And it worked great. I forked my Stackblitz app at https://stackblitz.com/edit/angular-nfwe6j to show how this was accomplished in my environment using the Semantic UI 2.3.1 of the font awesome fonts.