Replace characters in a node and all of its descendents

I need to generate an SQL "INSERT INTO" statement from an xml document.
One of the columns must hold the string representation of an XML node with all 
of its descendents.
To insert this node as a string I must replace each single quote with other two 
single quotes for conformance with SQL syntax.

I can not send a deep copy of the node taken with <xsl:copy-of> to the $text 
parameter of the "replace-string" template posted by Evan Lenz at 
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/replace.html
How can I get a deep copy of a node as a string to process it?
Multiple transformations are not recomended.
Thanks.
Sergiu Ignat

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