Add rho as icon in valueBox

Question

Can I add a rho (Greek letter small) as an icon to a value box in RShiny? For example, with the following code snippet, I have created a value box that has the € symbol as an icon:

valueBox(winterMean, subtitle = "Mean Winter", color = "black", icon = icon("euro-sign"))

This gives the following value box:

How can I replace the € symbol by a small rho?

Answer 1

We can add custom Greek letters using Unicode Character "ρ" (U+03C1) through custom css, see example:

Using flexdashboard:

Our example rmd file:

---
title: "My Rho"
output: 
  flexdashboard::flex_dashboard:
    css: styles.css
---

```{r}
library(flexdashboard)

valueBox(42, caption = "My Rho", icon = "fa-rho")
```

And additional styles.css file:

.fa-rho:before {
    font-weight: 700;
    content: '\03c1';
}

Output:

Note: For my test I kept css file in the same folder as rmd file, but it could be in any subfolder, then we need to define the full path in rmd, e.g.: resources/css/styles.css.

---

Using shinydashboard

library(shiny)
library(shinydashboard)

ui <- dashboardPage(
  dashboardHeader(),
  dashboardSidebar(),
  dashboardBody(
    includeCSS("styles.css"),
    valueBox(42, "My Rho", icon = icon("rho")),
  )
)

server <- function(input, output) { }

shinyApp(ui, server)

Output: