Lesson 4 taught you how to read the exception stack to help decipher the source of an exception. You can send the stack trace stored within an exception to a print stream or print writer using the printStackTrace method defined in Throwable. One implementation of printStackTrace takes no parameters, printing the stack trace on the system console (System.out) by default. A crude implementation of the log method might do just that. private void log(Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } (Try it.) For a production system, you will want a more robust logging solution. Sun introduced a logging API in J2SE 1.4; I discuss logging in the second half of this lesson. The stack trace representation printed by printStackTrace contains information that might be useful for more advanced programming needs. You could parse the stack trace yourself in order to obtain the information, which many developers have done. Or, as of J2SE 1.4, you can send the message getStackTrace to the exception object in order to access the information in already parsed form. |