Provided you're working in node or a browser with BigInt support, this version cuts costs by saving the expensive string construction for the very end:
const zero = 0n
const shift = 8n
function asciiToBinary (str) {
const len = str.length
let n = zero
for (let i = 0; i < len; i++) {
n = (n << shift) + BigInt(str.charCodeAt(i))
}
return n.toString(2).padStart(len * 8, 0)
}
It's about twice as fast as the other solutions mentioned here including this simple es6+ implementation:
const toBinary = s => [...s]
.map(x => x
.codePointAt()
.toString(2)
.padStart(8,0)
)
.join('')
If you need to handle unicode characters, here's this guy:
const zero = 0n
const shift = 8n
const bigShift = 16n
const byte = 255n
function unicodeToBinary (str) {
const len = str.length
let n = zero
for (let i = 0; i < len; i++) {
const bits = BigInt(str.codePointAt(i))
n = (n << (bits > byte ? bigShift : shift)) + bits
}
const bin = n.toString(2)
return bin.padStart(8 * Math.ceil(bin.length / 8), 0)
}