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Asked: 2026-05-27T17:47:14+00:00

I have a simple question: what is the longest / infinite duration that can

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I have a simple question: what is the longest / “infinite” duration that can be specified using xsd:dayTimeDuration() (in the ISO8601 format)?

Thanks,
M.

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  1. Editorial Team

    The W3C XSD specification doesn’t restrict/specify the maximum value for an xs:dayTimeDuration:

    The values of the Year, Month, Day, Hour and Minutes components are
    not restricted but allow an arbitrary unsigned integer, i.e., an
    integer that conforms to the pattern [0-9]+.

    However, a particular implementation may impose its implementation-dependent limits.

    For example, Saxon allows this value:

    xs:dayTimeDuration('P999999999DT2H30M10S')

    but raises an error on this value (one more 9-digit added to the days component):

    xs:dayTimeDuration('P9999999999DT2H30M10S')

    FORG0001: Invalid duration value ‘P9999999999DT2H30M10S’ (non-numeric
    component)

    XQSharp allows a bigger value — this is accepted:

    xs:dayTimeDuration('P999999999999999999DT2H30M10S')

    But one digit more in the days component raises an error:

    xs:dayTimeDuration('P9999999999999999999DT2H30M10S')

FODT0002: Underflow or overflow in construction of 'dayTimeDuration' in namespace 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema' from value 'P9999999999999999999DT2H30M10S'.

    Both of these two XPath implementations allow much bigger value-space than would be practically needed — just take into account that the age of the Universe is estimated at not more than 14 billion years, which is 5124000000000 days.

    XQSharp allows for durations considerably bigger than the age of the Universe, while the maximum Saxon allows is just slightly less than the age of the Universe.

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