Wonder what content:"\e61e" is in the .icon-trash:before class' CSS. I know that they use a font to make icons but I don't know what "\e61e" is? Any explanation?
Thank you in advance.
1 Answer
\e61e is technically this character: in UTF-8 encoding (the default encoding for CSS - this can be changed using @charset). So that's the literal answer to your question.
But as Joonas mentioned in the comments, a font can map a character like this to a symbol, in this case an icon, of their choosing. So in actuality, what you're seeing is likely different than this character - likely a trash can icon.
Since it's inside of a ::before (two colons are used because it's a pseudo element - one colon should be used for pseudo-classes), that allows it to be placed separately from the .icon-trash element itself, usually before or after the element. This is very common for icon fonts to do.
answered Jan 27, 2016 at 12:55
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1And since the character is well inside the Private User Area of Unicode, the glyph does not display anything useful if it doesn't also have the font applied to it. For any other font, you may see nothing, the regular 'not-available' Missing Character for your current font, or - my favourite - any random character that just happens to be in this place.– JongwareCommented Jan 27, 2016 at 20:53
atoz, is that, if for example the font doesn't load correctly, you are left with something like this:Download ( or it might render as empty, I'm not exactly sure ) and not something like:Download a, because the browser would render it with another font instead.trash cantoe61e, then that's what they do and no other font has anything to say about it.