The tokenization issue is not a bug. It's been like that forever, and it's by design. mIRC ignores "empty" tokens, ie. "---" is treated as a single "-", not 3 empty tokens separated by -'s. This is why mIRC does not like multiple spaces very much (because $1- is passed through the tokenization process). It's a double edged sword, but that's how it works.
As for your second issue, I can't reproduce this. I get "This is a test, 123456789", with the comma. Please ensure that you're testing on the latest mIRC, version 7.17, as bugs might exist in old versions.
