How do I add a Font Awesome icon to input field?

Question

How do I use the search icon included in Font Awesome for input? I have a search feature on my site (based on PHPmotion), that I want to use for the search.

Here's the code:

<div id="search-bar">

      <form method="get" action="search.php" autocomplete="off" name="form_search">
        <input type="hidden" name="type" value="videos" />
            <input autocomplete="on" id="keyword" name="keyword" value="Search Videos" onclick="clickclear(this,
            'Search Videos')" onblur="clickrecall(this,'Search Videos')" style="font-family: verdana; font-weight:bold;
            font-size: 10pt; height: 28px; width:186px; color: #000000; padding-left: 2px; float:left; border: 1px solid black; background-color:
            #ffffff" />
            <input type="image" src="http://viddir.com/themes/default/images/search.jpg" height="30" width="30" border="0" style="float:right;"/>
        <div id="searchBoxSuggestions"></div>
        </form>
        </div>

Answer 1

You can use another tag instead of input and apply FontAwesome the normal way.

instead of your input with type image you can use this:

<i class="icon-search icon-2x"></i>

quick CSS:

.icon-search {
    color:white;
    background-color:black;
}

Here is a quick fiddle: DEMO

You can style it a little better and add event functionality, to the i object, which you can do by using a <button type="submit"> object instead of i, or with javascript.

The button sollution would be something like this:

<button type="submit" class="icon-search icon-large"></button>

And the CSS:

.icon-search {
    height:32px;
    width:32px;
    border: none;
    cursor: pointer;
    color:white;
    background-color:black;
    position:relative;
}

here is my fiddle updated with the button instead of i: DEMO

---

Update: Using FontAwesome on any tag

The problem with FontAwsome is that its stylesheet uses :before pseudo-elements to add the icons to an element - and pseudo elements don't work/are not allowed on input elements. This is why using FontAwesome the normal way will not work with input.

But there is a solution - you can use FontAwesome as a regular font like so:

CSS:

input[type="submit"] {
    font-family: FontAwesome;
}

HTML:

<input type="submit" class="search" value="&#xf002;" />

The glyphs can be passed as values of the value attribute. The ascii codes for the individual letters/icons can be found in the FontAwesome css file, you just need to change them into a HTML ascii number like \f002 to  and it should work.

Link to the FontAwesome ascii code (cheatsheet): fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/cheatsheet

The size of the icons can be easily adjusted via font-size.

See the above example using an input element in a jsfidde:

DEMO

---

Update: FontAwesome 5

With FontAwesome version 5 the CSS required for this solution has changed - the font family name has changed and the font weight must be specified:

input[type="submit"] {
    font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Free"; // for the open access version
    font-size: 1.3333333333333333em;
    font-weight: 900;
}

See @WillFastie 's comment with link to updated fiddle bellow. Thanks!