Count number of chars in String

Is there a plugin or feature in IDEA that can count the number of characters
in the currently selected text? What I'm going for here is to select the
String I will be appending to a StringBuffer and be able to initialize the
StringBuffer with the size of the String. What might be even better is if
you could type out the String then select it and say "Create StringBuffer".
I know, you're probably saying I shouldn't have hard-coded Strings in my
code anyway. But, we do and we have a lot of them and this would be a cool
feature/plugin.