I don't know the meaning of one character in a Python code

I wonder what is the signification of the ';' sign in the instructions

if l&开发者_运维问答;lt;p:
if t>0:
if int(num)>=int(lst):

in the code of this question: Optimizing python code

Maybe an error in the third instruction, ';=' instead of '!='

But I can't imagine the signification of the character in the two other lines.

Is there someone who can explain, please ?

This actually should read

if l<p:
    ...
if t>0:
    ...
if int(num)>=int(lst):
    ...

It results from broken HTML. The characters < and > are represented by the HTML entities < and >, respectively. And somehow the web page you got this from got it wrong.