Getting full string stack trace including inner exception

Question

Java's e.printStackTrace() doesn't print all the details of the inner exception's stack trace.

Is there a ready way to generate the complete stack trace in string form? (besides formatting it myself)

Edit

I just found out what printStackTrace() does - apparently the stack frames it filters out are exactly the ones common to the inner exception and the outer one. So in fact it is rather what I want, and not the 'full' stack trace.

Answer 1

I suggest that you use the ExceptionUtils class from Apache Commons lang, which provides useful method for that, such as getFullStacktrace().

Answer 2

Yes you can use the StackTraceElement class returned by Throwable.getStackTrace() and find the details.

From the API:

The last element of the array (assuming the array's length is non-zero) represents the bottom of the stack, which is the first method invocation in the sequence.

Answer 3

getCause() method.

try
 {
    ....
  }catch(Exception ex) {
     Throwable t=ex;
    do{
        t.printStackTrace() 
        t=t.getCause();

       }while(t!=null);  
  }

Answer 4

I ended up rolling my own (I took the implementation of Throwable.printStackTrace() and tweaked it a bit):

public static String joinStackTrace(Throwable e) {
    StringWriter writer = null;
    try {
        writer = new StringWriter();
        joinStackTrace(e, writer);
        return writer.toString();
    }
    finally {
        if (writer != null)
            try {
                writer.close();
            } catch (IOException e1) {
                // ignore
            }
    }
}

public static void joinStackTrace(Throwable e, StringWriter writer) {
    PrintWriter printer = null;
    try {
        printer = new PrintWriter(writer);

        while (e != null) {

            printer.println(e);
            StackTraceElement[] trace = e.getStackTrace();
            for (int i = 0; i < trace.length; i++)
                printer.println("\tat " + trace[i]);

            e = e.getCause();
            if (e != null)
                printer.println("Caused by:\r\n");
        }
    }
    finally {
        if (printer != null)
            printer.close();
    }
}