EE isn't parsing PHP code, even though it should be

Question

I'm sending an Ajax request via jQuery to an EE template. This is the entire contents of the EE template:

{exp:channel:entries channel="tours" url_title="<?php echo $_POST["entry"]; ?>" limit="1" dynamic="no"}
    <p>Hello world. {title} - <?php echo $_POST["entry"]; ?></p>
{/exp:channel:entries}

PHP is Enabled for this template in the control panel, and the template has been fully synced to/from DB and filesystem.

When I simplify the file to just the following:

<p>Entry title: <?php echo $_POST["entry"]; ?></p>

It outputs: Entry title: test-entry-name, as $_POST['entry'] is the URL title being sent via Ajax.

However I couldn't get it to return the {title} for the entry no matter what. When I enabled the Output Profiler, this is the query EE is running:

SELECT t.entry_id FROM exp_channel_titles AS t
                LEFT JOIN exp_channels ON t.channel_id = exp_channels.channel_id LEFT JOIN exp_members AS m ON m.member_id = t.author_id WHERE t.entry_id !='' AND t.site_id IN ('1')  AND t.entry_date < 1409069885  AND (t.expiration_date = 0 OR t.expiration_date > 1409069885) AND t.url_title = '<?php echo $_POST[' AND t.channel_id = '7' AND t.status = 'open' ORDER BY t.sticky desc, t.entry_date desc, t.entry_id desc LIMIT 0, 1 

As you can see it's not parsing the PHP properly for some reason, but I can't work out why. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Jack

Answer 1

Jumped the gun a bit there, I've solved it the moment I posted the question. Hopefully my answer might help someone else having the same problem.

The solution was to change the PHP parsing stage in the template from "Output" to "Input".