I was able to get this to work, but while reading about it, I see all these little tips and recommendations regarding being efficient and not creating nodes when you only need strings.

In this code my goal was meet of deciding if the length of all the text concatenated together is greater than 30.
<xsl:variable name="strings" as="xs:string"><xsl:value-of select="answers"/></xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="slen" as="xs:integer"><xsl:sequence select="string-length($strings)"/></xsl:variable>

	Martin Honnen
	http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/