If you are writing xml you shouldn't have to escape ' ever unless you
use ' to delimit attribute or entity values. If you really need to do
this then possibly your way is as good as any, I assume you've made 
single-quote expand to some random unused character?

An alternative that would allow you to use ' as ' in the stylesheet
would be to just have one character mapping

<xsl:output-character character="&single-quote;" string="&amp;#39;" />

and then modify your input text with

<xsl:template match="text">
  <xsl:value-of select="replace(.,'''','&single-quote;')"/>
</xsl:template>

David

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