Thanks for everyone’s help.

I guess it might be easier to store the two paths (xpath2 and xpath3) separately.  I was just hoping that it might be 
possible to store them in a form like (xpath2 or xpath3) so that I could put them in a single attribute and build the full xpath later.

The problem I am going to have is that this is only the simplest case, for example the following is also possible

e.g.
/xpath1/(xpath2|xpath3|xpath4)/xpath5/(xpath6|xpath7)/(xpath6|xpath9)/xpath10

or an arbitrary combinations of xpaths
i.e.

/xpath_1(/xpath_x../xpath_y)^n/xpath_z

Edward

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