This will depend heavilly on the module that you're using, but looks like you forgot to tell us which one is.

Supposing that you're talking about CGI.pm, then you may know that almost all HTML tags generated by it doesn't have a written method/function but are created on the fly.

For example, if you do:

use CGI;
my $cgi = new CGI;
print $cgi->br, $cgi->start_br, $cgi->end_br, "\n";
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Will print:

<br /><br></br>
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Using the same idea I got the code below:

use warnings;
use strict;
use CGI;

my $cgi          = new CGI;
my $n            = 1;
my @COLUMN_TYPES = qw ( one two three four five );
my %attributes = (
                   'onChange' => 'displaydbfields(' . $n . ')',
                   'id'       => 'coltype' . $n,
);
my $col = { type => 'some type' };

print $cgi->popup_menu(
                        -id         => 'coltype' . $n,
                        -name       => 'type',
                        -values     => \@COLUMN_TYPES,
                        -default    => $col->{type},
                        -attributes => \%attributes,
    ),
    "\n";
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Which prints:

<select name="type" tabindex="1" id="coltype1">
<option value="one">one</option>
<option value="two">two</option>
<option value="three">three</option>
<option value="four">four</option>
<option value="five">five</option>
</select>
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