how to assign associate array to field input

as far as i know that won't do anything for you in HTML.
you might try either hacking a form element name attribute value that can be processed in the script (... name="color:color_id" ...) or defining the associativity with some hidden input parameters.


http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-cdata [w3.org]:

ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").