Returns

A string representation of the current Exception.

Remarks

Operation

Exception.ToString returns a representation of the current Exception that is intended to be understood by humans. Where the Exception contains culture-sensitive data, the string representation returned by Exception.ToString is required to take into account the current system culture.

Note: Although there are no exact requirements for the format of the returned string, it should as much as possible reflect the value of the object as perceived by the user.

Note: This method overrides object.ToString.

The Exception.ToString implementation obtains the fully qualified name of the current Exception, the message, the result of calling Exception.ToString on the inner exception, and the result of calling Environment.StackTrace. If any of these members is null or equal to string.Empty , its value is not included in the returned string.

Note to Inheritors

It is recommended, but not required, that Exception.ToString be overridden to return information about members declared in the derived class. For example, the ArgumentException class overrides Exception.ToString so that it returns the value of the ArgumentException.ParamName property, if that value is not null .

Usage

Use the Exception.ToString method to obtain a string representation of an Exception.

Example

The following example causes an Exception and displays the result of calling Exception.ToString on that Exception.

C# Example

using System;
public class MyClass {}
public class ArgExceptionExample {
 public static void Main() {
 MyClass my = new MyClass();
 string s = "sometext";
 try {
 int i = s.CompareTo(my);
 }
 catch (Exception e) {
 Console.WriteLine("Error: {0}",e.ToString());
 }
 }
}
   

The output is

Example

Error: System.ArgumentException: Object must be of type String.
   at System.String.CompareTo(Object value)
   at ArgExceptionExample.Main()
 

Requirements

Namespace: System
Assembly: mscorlib (in mscorlib.dll)
Assembly Versions: 1.0.5000.0, 2.0.0.0