Icon font helper (under construction)

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
I'm very new to CodeIgniter and I'm trying to get a hang of it. Recently I discovered icon fonts, which would come in handy since I'm not a graphics geek myself and I dislike real images on websites.

This morning I started writing an icon font helper for use in controllers. My reason for this is that in the future I maybe would like to switch my preferred icon font, but I don't want to change hundreds of hardcoded characters in all my views.

The current layout of my icon font helper is the following:

Code:

<?php

if (!defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

if (!function_exists('entypo')) {
function entypo() {
  $entypo = array(
   'dl'    => 'w',
   'edit'  => '&',
   'heart' => '6',
   'info'  => '`',
   'quote' => ';',
   'star'  => '7',
   'ul'    => 'v'
  );

  if (func_num_args() > 0) {
   if (is_array(func_get_arg(0))) {
    $args = func_get_arg(0);
   } else {
    $args = func_get_args();
   }
  }

  foreach ($entypo as $key => $char) {
   if (in_array($key, $args)) {
    $chars[$key] = $entypo[$key];
   }
  }

  return $chars;
}  
}

It is far from complete, but I'm using it like this in my controller:

Code:

<?php

class Blog extends CI_Controller {
public function __construct() {
  parent::__construct();
  $this->load->model('blog_model');
}

public function index() {
  $this->load->helper('typography');
  $this->load->helper('icon_font');

  $data['title'] = 'Blog';
  $data['blog_posts'] = $this->blog_model->get_blog_posts();
  $data['icons'] = entypo('edit', 'star', 'heart');

  $this->load->view('templates/header', $data);
  $this->load->view('blog/view', $data);
  $this->load->view('templates/footer', $data);
}
}

And then in my view:

Code:

<?php foreach ($blog_posts as $blog_post): ?>
<article class="blog-post">
  <h2><span class="icon">&lt;?php echo $icons['star'] ?&gt;</span>&lt;? echo $blog_post['title'] ?&gt;</h2>
  &lt;? echo auto_typography($blog_post['content']) ?&gt;
</article>
&lt;?php endforeach ?&gt;

The CSS class "icon" is set to use the @font-face rule for the chosen font, Entypo. Is this whole thing stupid? Am I stupid? (You may correct me on some other code errors as I'm quite new to CodeIgniter.)