OK, so trimming and removing a word from a string are two different things. What do you really want to accomplish? Trimming seems to be rather inefficient here, because you'd need to re-join the entire string again.
How about just doing

text = string_replace(text, "alive", "", false);

instead?

There are of course more flexible ways possible using string_left and string_right, but I wouldn't use the trim methods to accomplish this task.
Best Regards.
Hijacker

Line endings are CR ("\r"), LF ("\n"), or CRLF on windows ("\r\n")

The best way of handling this would be to split the string by both. As you might recall, the string_split function contains a boolian parameter that, when false, can include all or part of the delimiter. That way, in  the case of "\r\n", you'd be getting "\r", "\n", and obviously "\r\n" depending on which line endings are in use.

Note: this hasn't been tested, so you might have to do a bit of cleanup.

string[] line;
string[] content=string_split(f.read(), "\r\n", false);
for(uint i=0;i<content.length();i++)
{
line=string_split(i, "=", false);
if line[0]=="name")
{
//Do stuff, line[1] is the content.
}
if line[0]=="fail")
{
//do more stuff
}
}