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Answering my own question (i seem to do this a lot!)
in the vue documentation it says to place any files needed in this way in the public folder which I have done and then I have added this to the index.html in public for each file:
<link rel="icon" href="<%= BASE_URL %>static-assets/node_selected.svg" >
and the file is here: public/static-assets/node_selected.svg
in vs code
then when I come to use the file in the code I am doing this:
aFunction(process.env.BASE_URL + 'static-assets/node_selected.svg')
and that seems to work
Source:stackexchange.com