[sukatoa]

The way you initialize BigDecimal is strange for me....

I guess you should initialize first an Instance of it before you use valueOf(something) method....

But it may be simplified....
According to your string sample, that value may not be applicable to long, see what's the maximum value can long datatype handles...

You may also try Double,

eg.

Code:

String c = "848595950484765868574748349586738596879";
       try {
            BigDecimal num2 = new BigDecimal(new Double(c));
            System.out.println(num2);
       } catch (NumberFormatException nfe) {
            nfe.printStackTrace();
       }