---
id: isoduration
version: "20.11.0"
license: unclear
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: abandoned
---

# isoduration — Operations with ISO 8601 durations

License: permissive · Maintenance: abandoned · Popularity: top 1,000 on PyPI

## Install

pip install isoduration
uv add isoduration
poetry add isoduration

## Description

# isoduration: Operations with ISO 8601 durations.

[![PyPI Package](https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/isoduration?style=flat-square)](https://pypi.org/project/isoduration/)

## What is this.

ISO 8601 is most commonly known as a way to exchange datetimes in textual format. A
lesser known aspect of the standard is the representation of durations. They have a
shape similar to this:

```
P3Y6M4DT12H30M5S
```

This string represents a duration of 3 years, 6 months, 4 days, 12 hours, 30 minutes,
and 5 seconds.

The state of the art of ISO 8601 duration handling in Python is more or less limited to
what's offered by [`isodate`](https://pypi.org/project/isodate/). What we are trying to
achieve here is to address the shortcomings of `isodate` (as described in their own
[_Limitations_](https://github.com/gweis/isodate/#limitations) section), and a few of
our own annoyances with their interface, such as the lack of uniformity in their
handling of types, and the use of regular expressions for parsing.

## How to use it.

This package revolves around the [`Duration`](src/isoduration/types.py) type.

Given a ISO duration string we can produce such a type by using the...

## AI interpretation — verify before relying

Parse, format, and perform arithmetic operations on ISO 8601 duration strings (e.g., P3Y6M4DT12H30M5S), with support for years and months that timedelta cannot represent.

Verdict: isoduration cleanly solves ISO 8601 duration parsing with a design addressing isodate shortcomings, but its abandonment since 2020-11-01 is a significant risk. Use only if you can tolerate no upstream fixes and are confident the current behavior meets your needs indefinitely.

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/isoduration) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/isoduration/)