Hacking c2c_get_recent_posts – need some php help

I’m trying to add a new variable to Coffee2Code’s extension to show customizable post listings…

I want ‘the_category’ to simply display the category of each post. But because my PHP is really bad I can only get it to display on the page using ‘echo’, when I really want to assign it to the variable ‘new’.

Can anyone help me out?

case '%the_category%':
foreach((get_the_category()) as $cat) {
echo $cat->cat_name;
$new = $cat;
}
break;