I am getting some customer data but doesn't know the complete schema beforehand.I want to parse this data and store it in a scala object such that all the important fields are correctly filled and remaining unknown fields are dumped at a 'remData' placeholder field. class Record{ var imptField1 ="" var imptField2 ="" var remData ="" def this(data:String){ this() val fieldKeyValues = data.split(",") for( fieldKeyValue <- fieldKeyValues){ val tokens = fieldKeyValue.split("=") val key = tokens(0) key match{ case "imptField1"=> this.imptField1 = tokens(1) case "imptField2"=> this.imptField2 = tokens(1) case _ => this.remData +=fieldKeyValue+"," } } } } I also tried using Jackson objectMapper for that but it doesn't provide the functionality of dumping unknown fields in a placeholder. Please suggest if there is any efficient/cleaner way to do this?