The Google Closure library has functions to convert to/from UTF-8 and byte arrays. If you don't want to use the whole library, you can copy the functions from here. For completeness, the code to convert to a string to a UTF-8 byte array is:
goog.crypt.stringToUtf8ByteArray = function(str) {
// TODO(user): Use native implementations if/when available
var out = [], p = 0;
for (var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
var c = str.charCodeAt(i);
if (c < 128) {
out[p++] = c;
} else if (c < 2048) {
out[p++] = (c >> 6) | 192;
out[p++] = (c & 63) | 128;
} else if (
((c & 0xFC00) == 0xD800) && (i + 1) < str.length &&
((str.charCodeAt(i + 1) & 0xFC00) == 0xDC00)) {
// Surrogate Pair
c = 0x10000 + ((c & 0x03FF) << 10) + (str.charCodeAt(++i) & 0x03FF);
out[p++] = (c >> 18) | 240;
out[p++] = ((c >> 12) & 63) | 128;
out[p++] = ((c >> 6) & 63) | 128;
out[p++] = (c & 63) | 128;
} else {
out[p++] = (c >> 12) | 224;
out[p++] = ((c >> 6) & 63) | 128;
out[p++] = (c & 63) | 128;
}
}
return out;
};