App won't read php file

Hello, I am having an issue with an application I'm working on. Currently in my index.html file I have a simple jscript function that has the future goal of posting an input string from a user to a php file which then interprets this and grabs data from my mysql database and posts the output to a div in my index.html file. Currently if I put in a string of text to the php file for testing purposes, it outputs that string so I know they're linked properly. The second I put in php tags around what I want, nothing happens... even if its just an echo statement to echo a string let alone trying to get it to interpret input data. I have tried putting the php file hosted on my localhost WAMP server to see if that helped but I get the same result. This is all so far just using the mobile web preview to test.

function get() {
        $.post ('data.php', { postitems: form.inputitems.value },
            function(output) {
                $('#results') .html(output) .show();
            });
    }