Error on parity bits of Reed-Solomon error correction code

Question

I'm trying to figure this out but it seems never to be covered in articles explaining Reed-Solomon codes. If I have a string with 64 characters (bytes) and 4 parity bytes for error checking and recovery, I get an encoded string of 68 bytes. What if I get an error on a parity byte, say byte 66? Does it work as if the error was on byte 33?

From what I understand I have to send the 68 bytes through the channel, so the last 4 bytes may get incorrectly transmitted as the previous 64.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, it does.

It uses nearest neighbor decoding. In Reed Solomon codes, all codewords have the equal distances and so errors anywhere are decoded the same.

If you know your error is in the parity, you don't bother correcting it.