rewritecond problem with special characters

Hi,

I'm having trouble getting the rewritecond in the apache conf to work with the norwegian ø letter.

I have: ServerAlias www.mydoaminwithø.no and the following code.

 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.mydoaminwithø.no$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www\.mydomainwithoutø\.no/$1 [R=301,L]

Code (markup):

I've tried to replace the ø with &# 248; (without the space) but that didn't help.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.