custom walker to add iconfont to wp_nav_menu

Question

I want to add the font awesome iconfont to my menu list items, so I need to make a custom Walker.

Because the font per menu item will be different I was hoping to use the css class in the WP backend to add the name of the icon and then output that css class within the output of the walker.

Example how it should become:

$item_output .= '<a'. $attributes .'><i class="icon-' . [output css class WP backend] . '"></i>';

Does anyone know how to filter the CSS class to be able to add it to the custom walker?

Thanks and Merry Xmas!

Answer 1

ok, I figured it out myself.

instead of using the CSS class (as I cannot figure out how to filter it), I decided to use the description instead.

under the lines with $attributes I have added this line:

$description  = ! empty( $item->description ) ? esc_attr( $item->description ) : '';

And then I added that to the output as:

$item_output .= '<a'. $attributes .'><i class="icon-' . $description . '"></i>';

I would still be interested to hear whether it can be done with class too?