How do I retrieve an XML Element where an attribute is either X or Y?

Question

Consider this xml:

<parent>
    <child name="alpha" />
</parent>

and also this xml

<parent>
    <child name="beta" />
</parent>

There should be only a sinlge node at /parent/child with either alpha or beeta as it's name value.

To clarrify... there will never be 2 child nodes one each named alpha and beta

I'm trying to create a single xpath query which will return the value of name in each of these 2 cases.

I tried this...

/parent/child[@name='alpha' | @name='beta']/@name

...but it does not work.

How should I return this value..?

Update: I ammendedd the samples to ensure they were well formed as one answer indicated they were not.

Answer 1

Try with:

/parent/child[(@name='alpha') or (@name='beta')]/@name

It should also work without the parentheses.

Answer 2

The XML doesn't appear to be well-formed, it should be:

<parent>
    <child name="alpha"/>
</parent>

<parent>
    <child name="beta"/>
</parent>

If the XML isn't well-formed, I wouldn't expect much else to work..