How can I convert a stack trace to a string?

Question

What is the easiest way to convert the result of Throwable.getStackTrace() to a string that depicts the stacktrace?

Answer 1

This should work:

StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
e.printStackTrace(new PrintWriter(sw));
String exceptionAsString = sw.toString();

Answer 2

Printing stack trace to string

import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.io.StringWriter;

public class StackTraceUtils {
    public static String stackTraceToString(StackTraceElement[] stackTrace) {
        StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
        printStackTrace(stackTrace, new PrintWriter(sw));
        return sw.toString();
    }
    public static void printStackTrace(StackTraceElement[] stackTrace, PrintWriter pw) {
        for(StackTraceElement stackTraceEl : stackTrace) {
            pw.println(stackTraceEl);
        }
    }
}

It's useful when you want to print the current thread stack trace without creating instance of Throwable - but note that creating new Throwable and getting stack trace from there is actually faster and cheaper than calling Thread.getStackTrace.

Answer 3

With Java 8 Stream API you can do something like this:

Stream
    .of(throwable.getStackTrace())
    .map(StackTraceElement::toString)
    .collect(Collectors.joining("\n"));

It will take array of stack trace elements, convert them to string and join into multiline string.

Answer 4

public static String getStackTrace(Throwable t) {
    StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
    t.printStackTrace(new PrintWriter(sw));
    return sw.toString();
}

Answer 5

Print the stack trace to a PrintStream, then convert it to a String:

// ...

catch (Exception e)
{
    ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); 
    e.printStackTrace(new PrintStream(out));
    String str = new String(out.toByteArray());

    System.out.println(str);
}

Answer 6

Code from Apache Commons Lang 3.4 (JavaDoc):

public static String getStackTrace(final Throwable throwable) {
    final StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
    final PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(sw, true);
    throwable.printStackTrace(pw);
    return sw.getBuffer().toString();
}

The difference with the other answers is that it uses autoFlush on the PrintWriter.