On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Richard D. Moores <rdmoo...@gmail.com>wrote:
> So I've done quite a bit more work. With phone_book.py the user can > not only access phone numbers by the person's initials, but can add > items to the data file. I've also solved the problem of adding a > person who's initials have already been used in a key. > > I've pasted phone_book_for_pasting.py at <http://pastebin.com/2wm4Vf1P>. > > I'd appreciate any comments, instructive criticism, etc. > > It looks pretty good overall, though I didn't examine it too closely. IMHO there are some awkward bits which I think come from your representation of the data. I would probably make the phonebook itself a list, with each entry being a dict. Something like: book = [ {'name':'Mark Sanders', 'cell':'422-318-2346', ' email':'msand...@stanfordalumni.org'}, {'name':'AAA', 'phone':'575-3992', 'phone2':'1-800-472-4630', 'notes':'Membership #422 260 0131863 00 8'}, #... ] Then you can easily search your phone book by name, email, type of contact, relation, etc. A search by name would look like this: def find_by_name(name): for entry in book: if entry['name'] == name: return entry find_by_name('Mark Sanders') #==> {'name':'Mark Sanders', 'cell':'422-318-2346', ' email':'msand...@stanfordalumni.org} or a more general procedure for doing searches on your book could be: def find(criteria, term): for entry in book: if entry[criteria] == term: return entry find('name', 'Mark Sanders') #==> {'name':'Mark Sanders', 'cell':'422-318-2346', ' email':'msand...@stanfordalumni.org} Similarly you could search for initials by providing a to_initials procedure: def to_initials(name): return ''.join([i[0] for i in name.split(' ')]) def find_by_initials(initials): for entry in book: if to_initials(entry['name']) == initials: return entry find_by_initials('MS') #==> {'cell': '422-318-2346', 'name': 'Mark Sanders', 'email': ' msand...@stanfordalumni.org'} Adding a new entry would then be as simple as: def add_new_entry(entry, book): book.append(entry) For storing data I would probably use Pickle, which would look something like this: from cPickle import load, dump f = open('book.pk', 'w') dump(book, f) f.close() and loading your book is similar f = open('book.pk', 'r') book = load(f) f.close() If you want a human readable storage format I would look into json, but pickle has served me well for most purposes. Surely you can store your phonebook as plain text and parse it the way you have, but it's not necessary to do that with all the tools that exist for that purpose. -- Nick Zarczynski Pointless Programming Blog <http://pointlessprogramming.wordpress.com>
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