Strange .htaccess logics?

Is the .htaccess strange or am i stupid?

[Dalpe]

Ok, I screwed up and allowed phpsessid in urls, now i need to get rid of them and therefore I am trying to find all requests including phpsessid and redirect them with a 301.
This is what i tried:

RewriteRule ^(.*)PHPSESSID(.*)$ [domain.tld...] [R=301,L]

* starting with any characters
* including PHPSESSID
* ending with any characters

Ok, the only problem i could possible think of is that the first "(.*)" matches the entire string and therefore "PHPSESSID" isn't matched. But I'm quite sure i've been using statements like this before, so please help me in this moment of dispair! What is wrong?

[jdMorgan]

See RewriteCond [httpd.apache.org] %{QUERY_STRING} and RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST}

Query strings (anything following "?") are not part of a URL, but rather, data attached to a URL to be passed to the resource at that URL.

Therefore, RewriteRule cannot 'see' the query string, and you must use RewriteCond.

Jim