Printing a Stack Trace anywhere in Java

07/03/2009

You don’t need to catch an Exception in order to print a stack trace in Java.  Sometimes they can be helpful for debugging and logging purposes.  Here’s an example of how to print a stack trace at any moment:

new Exception().printStackTrace();

If you want more control over the output, you can build some code off the following:

  System.out.println("Printing stack trace:");
  StackTraceElement[] elements = Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace();
  for (int i = 1; i < elements.length; i++) {
    StackTraceElement s = elements[i];
    System.out.println("\tat " + s.getClassName() + "." + s.getMethodName()
        + "(" + s.getFileName() + ":" + s.getLineNumber() + ")");
  }