How to properly get contents of DLL file for PE parsing?

I'm trying to get the RVA of a function in kernel32.dll which means I need to use the offsets to find different structures in the file until I can get the IMAGE_EXPORT_DIRECTORY structure. However I know a lot of methods and ways of getting the contents of files interpret and leave certain characters and stuff out which would make this a nearly impossible task. So I want to know the best way to go about getting the contents of a dll file to copy into a character array.