Yes, you're outputting a new line for every line of the return from the Database query. What you probably want to do is one of two things:

• Go over $ref once you have it and copy it into a different hash, but instead of just saving the colour to $ref->{'color'}, make $ref->{'color'} an arrayref, then you can push new colours onto it every time you iterate over a row with the same item_id.
• Omit colour information from your initial query. Then, for each iteration over $ref, run another query like 'SELECT * FROM colors WHERE colors.item_id = '.$ref->{'item_id'} and push the results onto $ref->{'color'} as an arrayref.

Whichever of these two you use, you can then pass $ref->{'color'} to CGI like:

popup_menu( -name => "color", -values => $ref->{color})
[download]

Note that I haven't used CGI's drawing functions much, so double-check the syntax of popup_menu() before testing this out.

Update: changed stuff to the american (mis)spelling of colour.

LAI
:eof

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