The usual way is to use String#getBytes() to get the underlying bytes and then present those bytes in some other form (hex, binary whatever).
Note that getBytes() uses the default charset, so if you want the string converted to some specific character encoding, you should use getBytes(String encoding) instead, but many times (esp when dealing with ASCII) getBytes() is enough (and has the advantage of not throwing a checked exception).
For specific conversion to binary, here is an example:
String s = "foo";
byte[] bytes = s.getBytes();
StringBuilder binary = new StringBuilder();
for (byte b : bytes)
{
int val = b;
for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++)
{
binary.append((val & 128) == 0 ? 0 : 1);
val <<= 1;
}
binary.append(' ');
}
System.out.println("'" + s + "' to binary: " + binary);
Running this example will yield:
'foo' to binary: 01100110 01101111 01101111