How to retrieve current stack trace

Question

Do we have any method in Java which can fetch the current stack trace apart from Thread.dumpStack()? 

But, I don’t want to print the stack trace, I just need to fetch it.

To be more specific, what I want is a method which works similar to Environment.StackTrace in .NET.

Answer 1

Yes, in Java we do have a similar function called Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace();

This method will return you the array of StackTraceElement. The array returned gives the current stack trace. Below is a demo to implement this method:

public class TestDumpThread {
        //Dump the current thread stack trace.
    public static void dumpCurrentStackTrace() {
        StackTraceElement[] stes = Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace();
        for (StackTraceElement element : stes) {
            System.out.println(element);
        }
    }
 
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        dumpCurrentStackTrace();
    }
}​

This will give you the below output:

java.lang.Thread.getStackTrace(Unknown Source)

DemoDumpThread.dumpCurrentStackTrace(DemoDumpThread.java:3)

DemotDumpThread.main(DemotDumpThread.java:10)