XSLT 1.0 : Iterate over characters in a string

Question

I need to iterate over the characters in a string to build an XML structure.

Currently, I am doing this :

Answer 1

An XSLT 2.0 Solution:

For those of you, learning XSLT 2.0 /XPath 2.0, do note:

1. The use of the standard XPath 2.0 functions string-to-codepoints() and codepoints-to-string().

2. In XSLT 2.0 the value of the select attribute of may be a sequence of any items, not only nodes.