Which hook occurs last before rendering the exposed filter widgets?
You can do what you need by adding a custom property to your form array via form alter:

function yourmodule_form_views_exposed_form_alter(&amp;$form, &amp;$form_state, $form_id) {

  // get the related view
  $view = $form_state['view'];

  // get the exposed_input and store it into a custom property
  $form['#exposed_input'] = $view-&gt;exposed_input; 

}


The form array is directly available as a variable in your views-exposed-form.tpl.php, try adding the following to the end of that tpl file:

&lt;pre&gt;&lt;?php print_r($form['#exposed_input']); ?&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;


Hope this helps!