Using SHA-256 for CodeIgniter hashing

Question

CodeIgniter uses MD5 or SHA1 for its hashing:

$str = do_hash($str); // SHA1

$str = do_hash($str, 'md5'); // MD5 

But, my project requires SHA-256. How would I resolve this?

Answer 1

Can you not just call php's own hash()?

$str = hash ( "sha256", $str );