Rather than use any other connector. I found that MySQL have a Python 3.3 MySQL connector which solves this issue. You can take a look here and this really solves the issues in a quick way and documentation is really good too. This works on Windows 7 but I have no idea about other platforms.
The latest version of Python MySQL connector.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/myconnpy_example_connecting.html
Good luck.