How to do rowwise summation over selected columns using column index with dplyr?

Question

In dplyr, how do you perform rowwise summation over selected columns (using column index)?

This doesn't work

> iris  %>% mutate(sum=sum(.[1:4])) %>% head
  Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species    sum
1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa 2078.7
2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa 2078.7
3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa 2078.7
4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa 2078.7
5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2  setosa 2078.7
6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4  setosa 2078.7

I can do the following, but it's not beautiful

> iris %>% mutate(index=1:n()) %>%  
                gather("param", "value", 1:4)  %>% 
                group_by(index) %>% 
                mutate(sum=sum(value)) %>% 
                spread(param, value) %>% select(-index)
Source: local data frame [150 x 6]

   Species  sum Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width
1   setosa 10.2          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2
2   setosa  9.5          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2
3   setosa  9.4          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2
4   setosa  9.4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2
5   setosa 10.2          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2
6   setosa 11.4          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4
7   setosa  9.7          4.6         3.4          1.4         0.3
8   setosa 10.1          5.0         3.4          1.5         0.2
9   setosa  8.9          4.4         2.9          1.4         0.2
10  setosa  9.6          4.9         3.1          1.5         0.1
..     ...  ...          ...         ...          ...         ...

Is there more syntactically nicer way to achieve this?

EDIT: It's different from other questions, because I want to do rowwise operation on the columns selected by using column indices"

Answer 1

As already said in the comment, you can accomplish your task with:

iris %>% mutate(sum=Reduce("+",.[1:4]))

In this case also the base rowSums works:

iris$sum<-rowSums(iris[,1:4])

Answer 2

You can (ab)use base R's subset, which allows selection of columns by number:

iris %>% subset(select=1:4) %>% mutate(sum=rowSums(.))