Is there a way to specify what kind of variable you’re putting in a table? I have a student who is trying to add table values with string 14 but they’re formatting automatically as string 11 (the original format of the table that was read in), so they won’t combine properly.
I have hit this in the past too. I think I have either made a brand new column for the data or used the dtype or type argument (don’t remember which it is called) to make the string type longer. I can try to dig out some example if you want.
We ended up creating a new Astropy table with a fake entry in the column we needed to be a longer string, e.g., ‘123456789101112’, to force the type to be longer. Then we just deleted that row later. 
