Simple one liner to dump an Ascii string out in binary
echo $MESSAGE | perl -lpe '$_=unpack"B*",$_'
# To convert back
echo $BINARY | perl -lpe '$_=pack"B*",$_'
$ echo Hello World | perl -lpe '$_=unpack"B*",$_'
0100100001100101011011000110110001101111001000000101011101101111011100100110110001100100
$ echo 0100100001100101011011000110110001101111001000000101011101101111011100100110110001100100 | perl -lpe '$_=pack"B*",$_'
Hello World