Help text of function regex in module hfst should be corrected. It reads now ():
regex(re, **kwargs)
...
^n,k  catenate from n to k times, inclusive
^>n   catenate more than n times
^>n   catenate less than n times
^n    catenate n times
I assume that ^<n does the less than n times concatenation.
$ python3
Python 3.6.9 (default, Nov  7 2019, 10:44:02)
[GCC 8.3.0] on linux
...
hfst.version
'3.6.9 (default, Nov  7 2019, 10:44:02) \n[GCC 8.3.0]'