That was my post above and it occurred to me that you probably want $results as a string to be printed in a web page. If so, I might suggest something like this.

my $results = "Results: ";
my $type;
for my $entry (@$VAR1) {
        if ( $entry->{type} ne $type ) {
                $type = $entry->{type};
                $results .= "$type<br />";
        }
        $results .= "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$entry->{name} - $entry->{refer
+ence}<br />";
}
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Update: Now that I've thought about it, it seems you are using HTML::Template or something like it to display your data. And I'm not familiar with that but you probably do want to pass it a structure and not a string.