Java – Scala: ‘Val’ is not initialized

In Java, I can easily do the following:

final String str;
if (p() == true) {
    str = "foo";
} else {
    str = "bar";
}

How do I archive such content in scala? Of course, 'obviously' is impossible:

val str: String
if (p) {
    str = "foo"
} else {
    str = "bar"
}

Is there anything equivalent to what I can do in Java?

Solution

Since if else blocks are expressions in Scala, you can use them like this:

val str = 
   if (p) "foo"
   else "bar"

Compared with Java syntax, it also has the advantage of automatic type derivation