routines for encoding passwords with SSHA256 in PHP

function hexToAscii($hex)
{
    $strLength = strlen($hex);
    $returnVal = '';

    for($i=0; $i<$strLength; $i += 2)
    {
        $dec_val = hexdec(substr($hex, $i, 2));
        $returnVal .= chr($dec_val);
    }
    return $returnVal;
}

function HashedPassword($plainpassword)
{
    // generating a random salt
    $salt_hex   = substr(sha1(uniqid()),18,8);
    $salt_ascii = hexToAscii($salt_hex);

    $hashpassword = hash('sha256', $plainpassword . $salt_ascii);

    $returnVal = "{SSHA256.HEX}" . $hashpassword . $salt_hex;

    return $returnVal;
}

function VerifyHashedPassword($encodedpassword,$plainpassword)
{
    if(stripos($encodedpassword,'SSHA256'))
        {
            $encodedpassword =  substr($encodedpassword,13,strlen($encodedpassword));
        }

    $lengthstring = strlen($encodedpassword);

    $salt_hex = substr($encodedpassword, $lengthstring - 8, 8);
    $salt_ascii = hexToAscii($salt_hex);

    $newpasswordhash = hash('sha256', $plainpassword . $salt_ascii );

    $newencodedpassword = $newpasswordhash . $salt_hex;

    if ( "$encodedpassword" == "$newencodedpassword" ) {
       // if strings are equal, passwords supplied matches
       $returnVal = true;
   } else {
       // if strings are not equal, passwords do NOT match
       $returnVal = false;
   }

  return $returnVal;

}