why am I getting an undefined error?

I'm working on a javascript debugging tool, what I need at the moment is to get the line number off the end of a stack trace. So I wrote the following function to get a stack trace, remove the first few lines and then I was going to use indexOf(':') to get the line number. However I keep getting a "Cannot call method 'substring' of undefined" error. OK that should be an easy one to fix, but wait a minute - console.log suggest the file is defined. Can someone explain where I'm going wrong.

code:

var getLine = function () {
    var stack = (new Error('dummy').stack).toString();
    var stackLines = stack.split('\n');
    stackLines = stackLines.filter(function (element) {
        var exclude = [ "Error: dummy", "graph.js" ];
        for (var i = 0; i < exclude.length; i++) {
            if (element.indexOf(exclude[i]) !== -1) {
                return false;
            }
        }
        return true;
    });

    console.log("1 array", stackLines);
    console.log("2 element", stackLines[0]);
    console.log("3 typeof element", typeof (stackLines[0]));
    console.log("4 huh?", stackLines[0].substring(1));
}

output:

1 array [ '    at Object.<anonymous> (E:\\Development\\james\\main.js:52:18)',
  '    at Module._compile (module.js:456:26)' ]
2 element     at Object.<anonymous> (E:\Development\james\main.js:52:18)
3 typeof element string
E:\Development\james\graph.js:47
    console.log("huh?", stackLines[0].substring(1));
                                      ^
TypeError: Cannot call method 'substring' of undefined

the even stanger thing is - if i wrap the console.log statements in a try/catch then it executes without error?

code:

var getLine = function () {
    var stack = (new Error('dummy').stack).toString();
    var stackLines = stack.split('\n');
    stackLines = stackLines.filter(function (element) {
        var exclude = [ "Error: dummy", "graph.js" ];
        for (var i = 0; i < exclude.length; i++) {
            if (element.indexOf(exclude[i]) !== -1) {
                return false;
            }
        }
        return true;
    });
    try {
        console.log("array", stackLines);
        console.log("element", stackLines[0]);
        console.log("typeof element", typeof (stackLines[0]));
        console.log("huh?", stackLines[0].substring(stackLines[0].indexOf(":")));
    } catch (e){
        console.log("error",e);
    }

output:

1 array [ '    at Object.<anonymous> (E:\\Development\\james\\main.js:52:18)',
  '    at Module._compile (module.js:456:26)' ]
2 element     at Object.<anonymous> (E:\Development\james\main.js:52:18)
3 typeof element string
4 huh? :\Development\james\main.js:52:18)

I feel like I'm missing something very very obvious, but I'm not seeing it!