SHA-256 isn’t an “encoding” – it’s a one-way hash.
You’d basically convert the string into bytes (e.g. using text.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8)) and then hash the bytes. Note that the result of the hash would also be arbitrary binary data, and if you want to represent that in a string, you should use base64 or hex… don’t try to use the String(byte[], String) constructor.
e.g.
MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256");
byte[] hash = digest.digest(text.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8));