Here you can find the source of printStackTrace()
public static String printStackTrace()
//package com.java2s; /* //from ww w. ja v a 2 s .com Created on Mar 4, 2005 The Bungee View applet lets you search, browse, and data-mine an image collection. Copyright (C) 2006 Mark Derthick This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See gpl.html. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. You may also contact the author at mad@cs.cmu.edu, or at Mark Derthick Carnegie-Mellon University Human-Computer Interaction Institute Pittsburgh, PA 15213 */ import java.io.PrintWriter; import java.io.StringWriter; public class Main { public static String printStackTrace() { (new RuntimeException("Relax. There's no error, we're just printing the stack trace")).printStackTrace(); return null; } public static String printStackTrace(Throwable e) { StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(); PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(sw); e.printStackTrace(pw); return sw.toString(); } }