javascript - Font Awesome and Unicode Characters Materialize -

i using google's css framework materialize nice.

this framework has own select element dynamically changes ul.

i using fontawesome icons css framework , idea put icon in select follows

<select name="note[type]">    <option value="1"><i class="fa fa-car"></i>car</option> </select> 

but not display icon on other hand if write:  instead of <i> tag gets displayed correctly (note not actual code of car icon).

so question is: fill icons dynamically database, there way icon class such fa-car unicode character via php/javascript?

thanks , regards

i have solved in own way here answer might have problem:

first of on stackoverflow found how breakcss array using function:

private function breakcss($css) {      $results = array();      preg_match_all('/(.+?)\s?\{\s?(.+?)\s?\}/', $css, $matches);     foreach($matches[0] $i=>$original)         foreach(explode(';', $matches[2][$i]) $attr)             if (strlen(trim($attr)) > 0) // missing semicolon on last element, legal             {                 list($name, $value) = explode(':', $attr);                 $results[$matches[1][$i]][trim($name)] = trim($value);             }     return $results; } 

i loaded fontawesome code using file_get_contents , passed breakcss.

all below:

public function geticon($icon) {     $icon = $icon.":before";     $fa = file_get_contents(a_css.directory_separator."font-awesome.min.css");     $arr = $this->breakcss($fa);     $char = "";     foreach($arr $selector=>$style)     {         if (strpos($selector, $icon))         {             $char = str_replace("\\", "&#x", str_replace("\"", "", $style['content'])).";";         }     }     return $char; } 

usage geticon("fa-car");

hope helps!