03-contact-book

Project 3: Contact Book

What You'll Build

An object-oriented contact book that lets you add, search, edit, and delete contacts from the command line. Contacts are stored in a JSON file so they persist between sessions.

Skills Practiced

• Classes and OOP (Contact class, ContactBook class)
• File I/O with JSON
• Error handling
• Searching and filtering
• Input validation
• Text-based menu interfaces

Features to Implement

Core (start here)

1. Add a contact (name, phone, email)
2. List all contacts
3. Search contacts by name (partial match)
4. Delete a contact by name
5. Save/load contacts to/from a JSON file

Stretch Goals (once the core works)

• Edit an existing contact's details
• Add multiple phone numbers or emails per contact
• Sort contacts by name
• Export contacts to CSV
• Add categories/tags to contacts
• Input validation for phone numbers and email format

Example Session

=== Contact Book ===

1. Add contact
2. List contacts
3. Search contacts
4. Delete contact
5. Quit

Choose an option: 1
Name: Alice Smith
Phone: 555-1234
Email: alice@example.com
Contact added!

Choose an option: 1
Name: Bob Jones
Phone: 555-5678
Email: bob@example.com
Contact added!

Choose an option: 3
Search: ali
Found 1 contact(s):
  Alice Smith | 555-1234 | alice@example.com

Choose an option: 2
All contacts:
  1. Alice Smith | 555-1234 | alice@example.com
  2. Bob Jones   | 555-5678 | bob@example.com

Choose an option: 5
Contacts saved. Goodbye!

Hints

• Create a Contact class with name, phone, email attributes and a to_dict() method
• Create a ContactBook class that holds a list of Contact objects and handles load/save
• Use json.dump() / json.load() with [contact.to_dict() for contact in contacts]
• For search, use if query.lower() in contact.name.lower() for case-insensitive partial matching
• Use a while True loop for the menu, with break when the user chooses quit
• A @classmethod called from_dict() is a clean way to recreate Contact objects from JSON

Files

• starter.py — skeleton code with class and method signatures
• solution.py — complete working implementation