> I have a variable, I'd like to dump the XML contained in that variable
> without applying any parsing (debugging purposes).

I assume "dump" means "display" rather than "delete"?

What do you mean by saying that the variable contains XML? In XSLT 1.0 a
variable can contain a node-set, or it can contain a string. In both cases
you can display the value of the variable using 

<xsl:message><xsl:copy-of select="$var"/></xsl:message>

and no parsing will be involved. In fact, there is no way to invoke XML
parsing from standard XSLT, so I don't understand your concern.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/