How to split text text text into array

Firstly, you need to remove the paragraph tags that were added by the wp_autop filter. There’s another answer that covers this pretty well: Is there an uw-wp_autop function?

I’m going to change the function a little for our purposes (based on the markup example you gave):

function reverse_wpautop( $s ) {
    // Strip newlines
    $s = str_replace( "\n", "", $s );

    // Strip all <p> tags
    $s = str_replace( "<p>", "", $s );

    // Replace </p> with a known delimiter
    $s = str_replace( "</p>", "::|::", $s );

    return $s;
}

If all is working correctly, this should convert your markup from:

<p>2012-12-12</p>
<p>2012-6-23</p>
<p>2012-7-3</p>

To:

2012-12-12::|::2012-6-23::|::2012-7-3::|::

If you do a split now, you’ll end up with an extra, empty element in your array. So remember to take a substring before you split:

function split_delimited_string( $s ) {
    // Take a substring, removing the final 5 characters (::|::)
    $s = substr( $s, 0, -5 );

    return explode( "::|::", $s );
}

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