How to substitute an empty string (or null) with a default string concisely in Scala

Question

I have a method that returns a String. I want to substitute it with a default value such as "<empty>" if it returns an empty string or null. Let's assume its name is getSomeString, it is an expensive operation so I can call it only once, and I can't change its return type to Option[String]. For now, I'm doing the following:

val myStr = {
  val s = getSomeString
  if (s == null || s.isEmpty) "<empty>" else s
}

Is there a simpler way to achieve the same thing?

Answer 1

val myStr = Option(getSomeString).filterNot(_.isEmpty).getOrElse("<empty>")

Updated

I posted this code because I think the intent in this code is clear than if/else or pattern matching version, but I didn't consider the performance issue.

As the others in comments mentioned, this code is much slower than simple if / else or pattern matching(this line will create a lot new objects which is an expensive operation), so please do not use this code when performance is an issue.