Observe the following code:

import MySQLdb, MySQLdb.cursors, datetime
""" ... mysqlCursor is a cursor object from a connection to database from the MySQLdb module ... """
mysqlCursor.execute("SELECT NOW()")
timeRow = mysqlCursor.fetchall()
currentDateTime = datetime.datetime.strptime(timeRow[0]["NOW()"], "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

I get the following error:

TypeError: must be string, not datetime.datetime

HOWEVER, when I cast timeRow[0]["NOW()"] to a string like: str(timeRow[0]["NOW()"]) , it works fine.

For whatever reason the Python interpreter seems to interpret the string from the row of the MySQLdb cursor result as a datetime.datetime object. I have no explanation for this, besides it looking like a date time in the format of YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS. 

I have not tried this in Python 3.x, but the bug is in the latest compile of version 2.7.6 from the FTP distribution site.