Following instructions in
http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/library/csv.html#module-csv
I opened file in binary mode.  This might be simply a documentation
problem or it may run deeper.  Text mode works on red hat linux system.

Here's the use:

>>> stream=open('csv','rb')
>>> dialect=csv.Sniffer().sniff(stream.read(1024))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/users/lambert/bin/python/lib/python3.0/csv.py", line 169,
in sniff
    self._guess_quote_and_delimiter(sample, delimiters)
  File "/usr/users/lambert/bin/python/lib/python3.0/csv.py", line 210,
in _guess_quote_and_delimiter
    matches = regexp.findall(data)
TypeError: can't use a string pattern on a bytes-like object




Here's the conflicting documentation statement:

"If csvfile is a file object, it must be opened with the ‘b’ flag on
platforms where that makes a difference. ... see section Dialects and
Formatting Parameters.

All data read are returned as strings. No automatic data type conversion
is performed."

(Problem is that the binary file returnd data of type bytes.)

Thanks, Dave.

I verified the bug.  I started to work on a patch (see attached), but
it quickly seems to get out-of-hand with tracebacks about stuff not
supporting the buffer API.  I suspect the real solution might involve
doing something to convert the bytes to strings read when in binary mode,
but I don't have any idea how to finesse the requirement of bytes() for
an encoding arg.

This is in fact a doc bug.  The correct way to read a csv file in python3 is to open it in text mode with newline=''.  The docs have been updated to reflect this.