multiple drop down list

Hye

I newbie to php and i really need help. i have tried to change the line to

echo "<option value='$noticia2[category]'>$noticia2[category]</option>";

However, i still fail to make the output like
Value of $cat = Games
Value of $subcat = Baseball

So, how to take care of special chars and space present in category while sending the data to mysql database.

I really appreciated if anyone can help me with this. thanks