Which operator is used to check for equality between two values?

The equality operator, used to check whether two values are equal, is represented by two equal signs (==). When this operator is used in an expression, it evaluates to True if the values being compared are the same and False if they are different.

For example, in the expression 5 == 5, this will return True because both sides of the operator are equal. Conversely, in the expression 5 == 3, it evaluates to False since the two values are not equal.

The other options serve different purposes: the operator != checks for inequality, = is an assignment operator used to assign a value to a variable, and ! is typically used in some programming languages to denote logical negation but not in Python's syntax for equality checks. Understanding these distinctions helps clarify the role of the equality operator in conditional statements and comparisons in Python programming.