Kotlin Destructuring when/if statement

Question

So I have a String i would want to check if I should split into two, or return some default value. Like this:

val myString = "firstPart-secondPart"
val (first, second) = when (myString.contains("-")) {
        true -> myString.split('-', limit = 2)
        else -> ?? <-- How would i return ("Default1", "Default2") so the destructuring still works?
}

So my question is, how do i return two default strings, so that the deconstructing works? I've used String.split() before in order to deconstruct and it's really nice.

Answer 1

As an alternative to the good and correct answer of jrtapsell, you could use destructured Pairs:

val (first, second) = when (myString.contains("-")) {
    true -> myString.split('-', limit = 2).let { it[0] to it[1] }
    else -> "Default1" to "Default2"
}

Note 1: The resulting list with two elements is transformed to a Pair with the help of let.
Note 2: The infix function to is used to create Pairs here.