Applying a function to every row of a table using dplyr?

As of dplyr 0.2 (I think) rowwise() is implemented, so the answer to this problem becomes:

iris %>% 
  rowwise() %>% 
  mutate(Max.Len= max(Sepal.Length,Petal.Length))

Non rowwise alternative

Five years (!) later this answer still gets a lot of traffic. Since it was given, rowwise is increasingly not recommended, although lots of people seem to find it intuitive. Do yourself a favour and go through Jenny Bryan’s Row-oriented workflows in R with the tidyverse material to get a good handle on this topic.

The most straightforward way I have found is based on one of Hadley’s examples using pmap:

iris %>% 
  mutate(Max.Len= purrr::pmap_dbl(list(Sepal.Length, Petal.Length), max))

Using this approach, you can give an arbitrary number of arguments to the function (.f) inside pmap.

pmap is a good conceptual approach because it reflects the fact that when you’re doing row wise operations you’re actually working with tuples from a list of vectors (the columns in a dataframe).