Have you thought of making it a CGI so that you could access your information over the web? Instead of having the interactive inputs, you could make a MySQL database to store it, and have forms that read, store, and search the database. This would make it easier to search and parse your information than it would be using the flat file.
For example you could do:

select * from phone_list where name="Lloyd"

or

select * from phone_list where number=$number