This solves your problem, although it does not fix your function:
The idea is to use gather and spread on the columns which starts with the specific pattern. Therefore I create a regex which matches the column names and then first gather all of them, extract the group and the rename the groups with the cnames. Finally spread takes separates the new columns.
library(dplyr)
library(purrr)
library(tidyr)
library(stringr)
patterns <- c("S", "PR")
cnames <- c("Species", "PR")
names(cnames) <- patterns
complete_pattern <- str_c("^", str_c(patterns, collapse = "|^"))
df %>%
mutate(rownumber = 1:n()) %>%
gather(new_variable, value, matches(complete_pattern)) %>%
mutate(group = str_extract(new_variable, complete_pattern),
group = str_replace_all(group, cnames),
group_number = str_extract(new_variable, "\\d+")) %>%
select(-new_variable) %>%
spread(group, value)
# obj rownumber group_number PR Species
# 1 1 1 1 3 a
# 2 1 1 2 7 c
# 3 1 2 1 7 b
# 4 1 2 2 3 d
# 5 2 3 1 3 a
# 6 2 3 2 7 c
# 7 2 4 1 7 b
# 8 2 4 2 3 d
# 9 3 5 1 3 a
# 10 3 5 2 7 c
# 11 3 6 1 7 b
# 12 3 6 2 3 d
# 13 3 7 1 3 a
# 14 3 7 2 7 c
# 15 4 8 1 7 b
# 16 4 8 2 3 d
# 17 4 9 1 3 a
# 18 4 9 2 7 c
# 19 4 10 1 7 b
# 20 4 10 2 3 d
