Hashing a string with Sha256

Question

I try to hash a string using SHA256, I\'m using the following code:

using System;
using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.Text;
 public class Hash
          


        

Answer 1

I also had this problem with another style of implementation but I forgot where I got it since it was 2 years ago.

static string sha256(string randomString)
{
    var crypt = new SHA256Managed();
    string hash = String.Empty;
    byte[] crypto = crypt.ComputeHash(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(randomString));
    foreach (byte theByte in crypto)
    {
        hash += theByte.ToString("x2");
    }
    return hash;
}

When I input something like abcdefghi2013 for some reason it gives different results and results in errors in my login module. Then I tried modifying the code the same way as suggested by Quuxplusone and changed the encoding from ASCII to UTF8 then it finally worked!

static string sha256(string randomString)
{
    var crypt = new System.Security.Cryptography.SHA256Managed();
    var hash = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
    byte[] crypto = crypt.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(randomString));
    foreach (byte theByte in crypto)
    {
        hash.Append(theByte.ToString("x2"));
    }
    return hash.ToString();
}

Thanks again Quuxplusone for the wonderful and detailed answer! :)