How to hash some string with sha256 in Java?

Question

SHA-256 isn't an "encoding" - it's a one-way hash.

You'd basically convert the string into bytes (e.g. using text.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8)) and then hash the bytes. Note that the result of the hash would also be arbitrary binary data, and if you want to represent that in a string, you should use base64 or hex... don't try to use the String(byte[], String) constructor.

e.g.

MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
byte[] hash = digest.digest(text.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8));

I think that the easiest solution is to use Apache Common Codec:

String sha256hex = org.apache.commons.codec.digest.DigestUtils.sha256Hex(stringText);   

Another alternative is Guava which has an easy-to-use suite of Hashing utilities. For example, to hash a string using SHA256 as a hex-string you would simply do:

final String hashed = Hashing.sha256()
        .hashString("your input", StandardCharsets.UTF_8)
        .toString();

Full example hash to string as another string.

public static String sha256(final String base) {
    try{
        final MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
        final byte[] hash = digest.digest(base.getBytes("UTF-8"));
        final StringBuilder hexString = new StringBuilder();
        for (int i = 0; i < hash.length; i++) {
            final String hex = Integer.toHexString(0xff & hash[i]);
            if(hex.length() == 1) 
              hexString.append('0');
            hexString.append(hex);
        }
        return hexString.toString();
    } catch(Exception ex){
       throw new RuntimeException(ex);
    }
}

If you are using Java 8 you can encode the byte[] by doing

MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
byte[] hash = digest.digest(text.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
String encoded = Base64.getEncoder().encodeToString(hash);