For splitting delimited lists I really like Jeff Moden's approach.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/63003/

Depending on how you use XML as was previously mentioned can cause an issue with the special XML characters. You would probably want to do an initial select to get it encoded properly possibly nesting it inside your code. Here is an example showing the characters getting entity encoded.:

DECLARE @data table(

someData varchar(255) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY);

INSERT INTO @data (someData) VALUES ('SpecialChars, , & ');

INSERT INTO @data (someData) VALUES ('just, regular');

SELECT d.someData

FROM @data d

FOR XML PATH(''), TYPE