Replace characters in a node and all of its descendent

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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