Sql

Anki users are protective of their streak - the number of consecutive days they’ve done their reviews. Right now, for example, my streak is 621 days. So if you miss a day for whatever reason, not only do you have to deal with double the number of reviews, but you also deal with the emotional toll of having lost your streak.

You can lose your streak for one of several reasons. You could have simply been lazy. You may have forgotten that you didn’t do your Anki. Or travel across timezones put you in a situation where Anki’s clock and your clock differ. Others have described a procedure for resetting the computer’s clock as a way of recovering a lost streak. It apparently works though I haven’t tried it. Instead I’ll focus on a technique that involves working directly with the Anki database.

When the Anki application is open on the desktop, it places a lock on the sqlite3 database such that it can’t be queried by another process. One workaround is to try to open the database and if it fails, then make a temporary copy and query that. Of course, this only works with read-only queries. Here’s the basic strategy:

#!/usr/local/bin/python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# requires python >= 3.8 to run because of anki module

from anki import Collection, errors

if __name__ == "__main__":
    try:
        col = Collection(path_to_anki_db)
    except (errors.DBError:
        # anki is open, copy to temp file
        import tempfile
        import shutil
        import os

        with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as tmpdir:
            dst = os.path.join(tmpdir, 'collectiontemp.anki2')
            shutil.copy(COLLECTION_PATH, dst)
            col = Collection(dst)
            # do something with Anki db

Note that the tempfile context manager will discard the database, if there are actions on the collection that are common to the Anki-is-open and Anki-is-not-open paths then those should be abstracted to separate function.