How can I dynamically load an icon using its snake_case name (React, material-ui)

EDIT: This answer for MUI v4, MUI v5 answers below (but untested by me)

OK, so I massively overthought this.

Correct answer

Turns out material-ui includes an icon component that allows you to do this... and it converts names itself, so accepts snake, pascal and other variants. BEWARE this will massively increase bundle size, as pointed out in the comments. If you're bundle size constrained, you'll have to take a different approach of serving the icon SVGs from somewhere!

import Icon from '@material-ui/core/Icon'

...

render() {
  return (
    <Icon>{props.iconName}</Icon>
  )
}

Previous answer (working but massive overkill)

Create function to:

  • convert snake_case to PascalCase
  • Handle special cases reported in the material-ui icons documentation

...Then use the material-ui Icon component.

Here's the code:

import Icon from '@material-ui/core/Icon'

function upperFirst(string) {
  return string.slice(0, 1).toUpperCase() + string.slice(1, string.length)
}

function fixIconNames(string) {
  const name = string.split('_').map(upperFirst).join('')
  if (name === '3dRotation') {
    return 'ThreeDRotation'
  } else if (name === '4k') {
    return 'FourK'
  } else if (name === '360') {
    return 'ThreeSixty'
  }
  return name
}

...

render() {
  const iconName = fixIconNames(props.iconName)
  return (
    <Icon>{props.iconName}</Icon>
  )
}

import React, {createElement } from "react";
import * as MuiIcons from "@material-ui/icons";

export default ({ iconName }) => (
  <div>
      {createElement(MuiIcons[iconName])}
  </div>
);


<ComponentWithIcon iconName="Add" />
<ComponentWithIcon iconName="Anchor" />