Writing Exception.printStackTrace to a string

Question

Hi,
I need to write the exception strack trace to a String so that I can email it details of exceptions on a web site to a system administrator.
The printStackTrace() method prints exactly what I want to an OutputStream (such as system.out) but I don't know how I can get this into a string. Simply doing Exception.toString() does not produce enough detail about the exception to make it useful.
Can anyone help?
Below is some code that demonstrates what I'm trying to do but does not work because the printStackTrace() method on the exception object doesn't write to a string.
try {
// Some exception here, in this case / by 0
int i = 7 / 0;
catch (Exception e) {
// This is too short and does not give enough information
String exceptionInfoShort = e.toString()
// This is what I want to do but it is not supported
String exceptionInfoLong = e.printStackTrace();
Cheers,
Brent.

Answer 1

No point messing about with PrintWriters and StringWriters. When you call e.printStackTrace() the method will construct a StringBuffer from every item in the stack trace and then print out the String representation of the buffer.
You could do this yourself if only you could get the stack trace. Strangely, there is a method Exception.getStackTrace() that does exactly that (amasing what you can learn in two seconds from the API):
void eMailStackTrace(Exception e) {
   StackTraceElement[] trace = e.getStackTrace();
   StringBuffer stackTraceBuffer = new StringBuffer();
   for(int i = 0 ; i < trace.length ; i++)
      stackTraceBuffer.append(trace.toString());
String stackTrace = stackTraceBuffer.toString();
email(stackTrace);