Instead of printing to stdout, if you need a string to pass to a logger you can use:

''.join(traceback.format_stack())

Note, that traceback.format_stack() returns the stacktrace as a formatted list of strings, so you can slice it anyway you want. To get the last few elements of the stacktrace you could do:

''.join(traceback.format_stack()[-N:])

Where N is the number of levels you are interested in.

Some other answer have already pointed out the traceback module.

Please notice that with print_exc, in some corner cases, you will not obtain what you would expect. In Python 2.x:

import traceback

try:
    raise TypeError("Oups!")
except Exception, err:
    try:
        raise TypeError("Again !?!")
    except:
        pass

    traceback.print_exc()

...will display the traceback of the last exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "e.py", line 7, in <module>
    raise TypeError("Again !?!")
TypeError: Again !?!

If you really need to access the original traceback one solution is to cache the exception infos as returned from exc_info in a local variable and display it using print_exception:

import traceback
import sys

try:
    raise TypeError("Oups!")
except Exception, err:
    try:
        exc_info = sys.exc_info()

        # do you usefull stuff here
        # (potentially raising an exception)
        try:
            raise TypeError("Again !?!")
        except:
            pass
        # end of useful stuff


    finally:
        # Display the *original* exception
        traceback.print_exception(*exc_info)
        del exc_info

Producing:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "t.py", line 6, in <module>
    raise TypeError("Oups!")
TypeError: Oups!

Few pitfalls with this though:

• From the doc of sys_info:

  Assigning the traceback return value to a local variable in a function that is handling an exception will cause a circular reference. This will prevent anything referenced by a local variable in the same function or by the traceback from being garbage collected. [...] If you do need the traceback, make sure to delete it after use (best done with a try ... finally statement)

• but, from the same doc:

  Beginning with Python 2.2, such cycles are automatically reclaimed when garbage collection is enabled and they become unreachable, but it remains more efficient to avoid creating cycles.

On the other hand, by allowing you to access the traceback associated with an exception, Python 3 produce a less surprising result:

import traceback

try:
    raise TypeError("Oups!")
except Exception as err:
    try:
        raise TypeError("Again !?!")
    except:
        pass

    traceback.print_tb(err.__traceback__)

... will display:

  File "e3.py", line 4, in <module>
    raise TypeError("Oups!")

you want inspect.stack(), which returns a list of frame objects

import inspect

def a(): 
   b()

def b():
   c()

def c():
   print inspect.stack()