When trying to build our curriculum inventory I needed to match thousands of strings in Google Sheets. Doing this manually would have been tedious and prone to error. The EQ function would fail if there was one character different, forget about objectives that had words shifted around. Here’s my script that outputs the percentage of string A that is present in string B averaged with the percentage of string B that is in string A. I found that anything over 40% seems to be semantic match.
function howMuchMatches(string1, string2) {
// clean both strings
var array1 = string1.trim().toLowerCase().replace(/[^\w\s\d]/g,"").split(" ");
var array2 = string2.trim().toLowerCase().replace(/[^\w\s\d]/g,"").split(" ");
// how much of string1 is in string2
var numberOfMatches12 = 0;
for (i=0; i < array1.length; i++) {
if (array2.indexOf(array1[i])>=0)
{ numberOfMatches12++; }
// how much of string2 is in string1
var numberOfMatches21 = 0;
for (i=0; i < array2.length; i++) {
if (array1.indexOf(array2[i])>=0)
{ numberOfMatches21++; }
// convert those to percentages
var percentMatch12 = numberOfMatches12/array1.length;
var percentMatch21 = numberOfMatches21/array2.length;
// return the average the two
return (percentMatch12 + percentMatch21)/2;
}
my peripheral brain 
Hello Rahul
Very nice piece of code. Got the following when trying to use:
“Missing ) after condition. (line 11, file “Code”)”
Hi Jfeder. Looks like WordPress cleaned my code such that greater-than signs (“>”) with & g t ; . If you replace & g t ; with “>” it should work. Sorry about that, and thanks for catching it.. I’ll fix it when I get back to my laptop.