max - rowwise maximum for R

Question

I have a dataframe as below. I want to get a column of maximums for each row. But that column should ignore value 9 if it is present in that row. How can i achive that efficiently?

df <- data.frame(age=c(5,6,9), marks=c(1,2,7), story=c(2,9,1))
df$max <- apply(df, 1, max)    
df

Answer 1

Here's one possibility:

df$colMax <- apply(df, 1, function(x) max(x[x != 9]))