Regex for string that contains a '=' - regex

Question

I've tried to create a regular expression that validates a string and checks if it has a = character in it.
I also need it to be in brackets like this
(.*)
in order to retrieve the value later.
What I tried was
(.*=.*)
but it doesn't work.
How can I match a string that contains a = ?
Edit:
This is my regex from my htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^(home|page1|page2|page3|admin)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*=.*) index.php?area=$1&page=$2&content=$3&$4 [L]
RewriteRule ^(home|page1|page2|page3|admin)/(.*)/(.*) index.php?area=$1&page=$2&content=$3 [L]
Examples would be
/home/foo/bar and /home/foo/bar/page=2
That's what I pretty much want to achieve. Add GET parameters in an eye-candy way. Also, I need to parse if it contains a = character, because there are various depths in the web site such as /foo/page=1 and foo/bar/page=1

Answer 1

Actually this works for me. This call:
preg_match('/.*=.*/','foo=bar');
returns 1.
However, if you just want to check if the string contains =, then strpos is just enough.
If, instead, it is in the context of a bigger regular expression, the problem may be elsewhere. Please show us the whole matching pattern and some sample inputs with the corresponding expected behaviour.