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Any suggestions on how to, in a cross-browser way, generate a stack trace in javascript?

Newer browsers, Chrome and Firefox, expose a console object that allows stack traces to be generated. This method does not provide a method for storing the stack trace to a variable.

https://github.com/eriwen/javascript-stacktrace Works quite nicely, but it makes separate ajax requests to load script files included as part of the trace. This seems to be a common method in trace libraries. I'm guessing that browsers do not expose enough information to generate a meaningful stack-trace(line numbers, function names, file names, arguments, etc).

Kyle
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  • You are correct that IE9- (let's face it, that probably what we're having trouble with here) doesn't give much useful information. One could get the file and line number from `window.onerror` except that only fires some of the time and the line number is sometimes wrong. – Eric Wendelin Nov 25 '12 at 23:22
  • Yes, as usual, IE is the problem child. I'm stuck supporting IE7 for which the onerror event's line number and function name information is terrible. It can still be useful; I use it to write logs for uncaught errors. – Kyle Nov 26 '12 at 00:43

3 Answers3

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Create an Error object and check it for a stack member. Adapted from Code Overtones:

var e = new Error('dummy');
var stack = e.stack.replace(/^[^\(]+?[\n$]/gm, '') // remove lines without '('
  .replace(/^\s+at\s+/gm, '') // remove prefix text ' at '
  .split('\n');
console.log(stack);

Error.stack is documented in Mozilla's reference documentation.

Vincent Scheib
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0

Airbrake provides a JavaScript library for logging stacktraces to your Airbrake account or Errbit server.

I don't get stack traces in IE, and others can be imperfect, but it definitely looks like it's along the lines of what you're looking for.

cjc343
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  • Thanks. I already have a framework in place which can log to my server. It's basically log4j in javascript. The stack-trace generating code in the link you provided looks like it was borrowed from the project in my question. I'm looking for other libraries for stack-trace generation. The actual logging framework in use should be separate. – Kyle Nov 20 '12 at 20:37
-1

You can generate javascript stacktrace using stacktrace.js

http://stacktracejs.com/

Also, you can refer to : http://www.eriwen.com/javascript/js-stack-trace/

Deepak Goyal
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