`numpy.ma.core:asarray`

Signature

def asarray ( a , dtype = None , order = None )

Convert the input to a masked array of the given data-type.

No copy is performed if the input is already an ndarray. If a is a subclass of MaskedArray, a base class MaskedArray is returned.

a : array_like: Input data, in any form that can be converted to a masked array. This includes lists, lists of tuples, tuples, tuples of tuples, tuples of lists, ndarrays and masked arrays.
dtype : dtype, optional: By default, the data-type is inferred from the input data.
order : {'C', 'F'}, optional: Whether to use row-major ('C') or column-major ('FORTRAN') memory representation. Default is 'C'.

import numpy as np
x = np.arange(10.).reshape(2, 5)
x
np.ma.asarray(x)
type(np.ma.asarray(x))