A data communication method and system for uniform arbitrary puncturing of parity bits generated by an encoder. The parity bits are stored in a buffer, and an a-bit accumulator is incremented to a predetermined initial value. For each parity bit in the buffer, the following steps are performed: the accumulator is incremented by a predetermined increment value, and if the accumulator overflows, the parity bit is selected for transmission. The predetermined initial value and the predetermined increment value are selected to achieve a desired amount of puncturing. In a further hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) communication method and system, the parity bits are generated by a low density parity check (LDPC) coder.