Thanks two Kit Baum two new packages are available on SSC.

comtrade
comtrade downloads trade data from UN Comtrade. UN Comtrade trade data is available in the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. comtrade uses the user written command jsonio to download the data in the JSON format, it then parses the retrieved data bringing it in into an user friendly format.

UN Comtrade offers data in three different ways, via a bulk download, an API call or a web address. comtrade can retrieve data from all of those, but validates the request first. In addition it can download data from the Monthly Bulletin of Statistics (MBS) of Analytical Trade Tables and World Tables of International Trade Statistics Yearbook (ITSY) including footnotes.

For more information and examples, please see my github page for comtrade.


htmltab2stata
htmltab2stata parses html code from websites. It detects tables enclosed with the html <table> environment and transforms the table into a Stata dataset. To do so, htmltab2stata parses the html code and uses <tr> as row identifiers and code enclosed in <td> as columns. It only transfers content which is not enclosed in < > to Stata, unless option href is used for links. Empty cells remain empty in the Stata dataset.

For more information and examples, please see my github page for htmltab2stata.