As far as I know - no, there's no other way. In fact, what you've got is the default example they have for scanning big.Int
in the documentation.
package main
import (
"fmt"
"log"
"math/big"
)
func main() {
// The Scan function is rarely used directly;
// the fmt package recognizes it as an implementation of fmt.Scanner.
i := new(big.Int)
_, err := fmt.Sscan("18446744073709551617", i)
if err != nil {
log.Println("error scanning value:", err)
} else {
fmt.Println(i)
}
}
You can see the relevant section here - http://golang.org/pkg/math/big/#Int.Scan