WebGL: get error/warning message text as a string

When an error occurs within WebGL, a warning message is usually displayed in the browser’s console.

For example, trying to create a texture which is too big:

gl.texImage2D(
    gl.TEXTURE_2D,     // target
    0,                 // level
    gl.RGBA,           // internalformat
    1000000,           // width
    1000000,           // height
    0,                 // border
    gl.RGBA,           // format
    gl.UNSIGNED_BYTE,  // type
    null               // data
);

Chrome and Safari display this warning message in the console:

WebGL: INVALID_VALUE: texImage2D: width or height out of range

Firefox displays this warning message:

Error: WebGL: texImage2D: the maximum width for level 0 is 4096

How can I programmatically obtain this message from WebGL?

I’m looking for something like gl.getErrorMessage() which would return a string.

What I’ve tried

WebGL errors don’t throw JavaScript errors, so it’s not possible to catch them to get their message property.

gl.getError() only returns an ErrorCode enum value, such as INVALID_VALUE.

gl.getShaderInfoLog() only provides error messages relating to a specific shader (eg. compilation errors).

gl.getProgramInfoLog() only provides error messages relating to a specific program (eg. linking errors).

Khronos have created a debugging wrapper called WebGLDebugUtils, but it seems the only method relating to error messages is glEnumToString(), which converts an enum value (eg. INVALID_VALUE) to a string.

Answer

The short answer is, You can’t.

WebGL only returns error numbers through gl.getError(). The rest of it is just stuff the browsers added to help devs find their errors since they already have to do lots of validation for WebGL.

Maybe you should propose a WebGL extension for it.