capture printStackTrace even though void

[Stephen Huey]

I'm getting a NullPointerException but I can't figure out where b/c calling toString on it doesn't tell me that. I figure I need printStackTrace, but that returns void, and I don't know how to access System.out and System.err stuff and print it out on my webpage that my JSP is outputting. I just need to capture the printStackTrace into a string so I can paste it on the webpage and figure out if it's going to tell me a line number in my code.
Thanks!

[Wayne L Johnson]

For one of my web apps I've created an "Error.jsp" which is set as the "errorPage" of my other JSPs. Here's a snippet from "Error.jsp" that prints the exception and the StackTrace. You can pass either a PrintStream or PrintWriter to the "printStackTrace()" method, which is what I do here. Then I capture the contents of the writer and dump it to the screen.

...
<h2>We're sorry; an error occurred processing your request ...</h2>
You got a <%= exception %> <br/>
<%  java.io.StringWriter sw = new java.io.StringWriter(1024);
    java.io.PrintWriter pw = new java.io.PrintWriter(sw);
    exception.printStackTrace(pw);
%>
<p>
<h2>Traceback:</h2>
<span class="normal"><%= sw.getBuffer().toString() %></span>
<p>
...

The Traceback isn't formatted very nicely (since the browser ignores newline characters), but at least I get what I need.
Hope this helps ...

[Stephen Huey]

Oh, sweet...thanks!

[Joel McNary]

If/since you're in a JSP, you could also throw a ServletException wrapped around your exception.
throw new ServletException(myException);
This will print the error on the page in a formatted way (with newlines translated as <br> ) . Note that the first error will be the ServletException; you will want to look beneath that where it will read "Root Cause:" and print out your problem exception there.
[ September 05, 2003: Message edited by: Joel McNary ]

[David O'Meara]

You can also wrap a PrintWriter around the JspWriter and pass it directly to e.printStackTrace( new PrintWriter( out ) ), but I tend to use something very similar to Wayne.
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