How to get a stack trace object in Ruby?

Question

I need to get a stack trace object in Ruby; not to print it, just to get it to do some recording and dumping for later analysis. Is that possible? How?

Answer 1

For Ruby 2.0+, you can use Kernel#caller_locations. It is essentially the same as Kernel#caller (covered in Sven Koschnicke's answer), except that instead of returning an array of strings, it returns an array of Thread::Backtrace::Location objects. Thread::Backtrace::Location provides methods such as path, lineno, and base_label, which may be useful when you need access to specific details about the stack trace, and not just a raw string.

From the docs:

caller_locations(start=1, length=nil) → array or nil

caller_locations(range) → array or nil

Returns the current execution stack—an array containing backtrace location objects.

See Thread::Backtrace::Location for more information.

The optional start parameter determines the number of initial stack entries to omit from the top of the stack.

A second optional length parameter can be used to limit how many entries are returned from the stack.

Returns nil if start is greater than the size of current execution stack.

Optionally you can pass a range, which will return an array containing the entries within the specified range.

Usage example:

def a
  caller_locations(0)
end
def b
  a
end
def c
  b
end

c.map(&:base_label)
#=> ["a", "b", "c", "
"]