[taran-dev4u]

Closes #4583.

In MsWordDocumentBackend, XML comments and processing instructions (such as docx4j's <!-- Created by docx4j --> banner or comments in paragraphs and table cells) caused etree.QName to raise ValueError because non-element lxml nodes do not have string tags. When present inside table cells, equations and rich-cell checks also raised TypeError or AttributeError, causing tables to be dropped as broken.

This adds isinstance(node.tag, str) guards across element iteration paths in the backend so comments and processing instructions are skipped cleanly, and adds a regression unit test covering document body, paragraph, run, table row, and cell locations.

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Codecov Report

❌ Patch coverage is 57.14286% with 12 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
docling/backend/msword_backend.py	57.14%	6 Missing and 6 partials ⚠️

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[github-actions]

AI triage (advisory)

Checked commit eb6131f33c. The analysis read the diff only. It did not run code from this pull request.

This PR adds type checks to skip XML comments and processing instructions during DOCX element iteration, and adds a regression test.

Topic labels added: bug, docx.

CI safety: no concern found. A maintainer must still approve CI.

Possible duplicates

PR	State	Signal	Assessment
#4584	open	also references issue #4583	duplicate: Both PRs fix issue #4583 by handling XML comments and processing instructions in DOCX files.

2 related pull request(s) in the same code

PR	State	Signal	Assessment
#4649	open	changes the same code	related: Both PRs modify docx element traversal, but PR 4649 adds support for body-level mc:AlternateContent choice branches.
#4622	open	changes the same code	related: Both PRs modify msword_backend.py, but PR 4622 preserves w:sym symbols and maps Symbol font characters.

_{The ai:* labels are advisory. They do not approve CI and they do not add tests:full. A new push runs this check again.}

[taran-dev4u]

Closing in favor of #4584 which routes XML comments to the NOTES layer per maintainer feedback.