First block of bitcoin block gives empty string

Question

I've downloaded a block named blk00000.dat from https://github.com/bitcoin-abe/bitcoin-abe/blob/master/test/btc200/blocks/blk00000.dat

I've written the following code to read first byte of the file but I am getting an empty sting. 

f = open('blk00000.dat')
byte1 = f.read(1)
print byte1

Answer 1

Most likely the first byte is not a printable character. Since you are reading binary data, you need to open the file in binary mode:

f = open('blk00000.dat', 'rb')