Abstract: A mechanism for correcting errors in a stream of digital data that are encoded at a transmitter site, transmitted over a communication channel to a receiver site and decoded at the receiver site to recover the digital data pre-encodes the data using a parity-encoder. The location of the errors is determined through a comparison operation on which the receiver is able to generate a `template` of the pattern of errors in the received digital data stream. This error pattern template is then used in an iterative pattern predictive error correction process to identify the location of burst errors contained in the recovered data and to controllably modify the output of the receiver's host decoder so as to remove the located errors from the originally decoded data.