Please help - mod_rewrite problems!

I have a search form on my site, so users can search a database of business listings.

The form is like this:

Then it performs a search and spits out results, the url that it produces in the browser is:

I have the following in my .htaccess

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*).htm$ http://mydomain.com/search.php?q=$1

which works fine if I use <a href="http://www.mydomain.com/searchterm.htm">Searchterm</a>
my resulting url is http://www.mydomain.com/searchterm.htm

but I don't know how to get it to rewrite properly when $q is from a form input.

Any thoughts?

 

problem solved at http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=392719

mods, please close thread