Do you want to find all the friends? If there are only one id, then you don't need like
part, as you already found your friend. On the other part, if you not sure about id
of your friends, and just want to find all friends matching your like criteria, you may remove where_in
part.
This will find your friends:
$this->db->select('id, email, first_name, last_name, current_location_state, current_location, avatar, avatar_fb');
$this->db->from('users');
$this->db->like('first_name', $search);
$this->db->or_like('last_name', $search);
$this->db->or_like("CONCAT(first_name, ' ', last_name)", $search);
$this->db->or_like('email', $search);
Considering there's only one id, such query will find only one friend:
$this->db->select('id, email, first_name, last_name, current_location_state, current_location, avatar, avatar_fb');
$this->db->from('users');
$this->db->where_in('id', $ids);
EDIT
Sometimes, with codeigniter, it is better to use a raw query:
$this->db->query('
SELECT `id`, `email`, `first_name`, `last_name`, `current_location_state`, `current_location`, `avatar`, `avatar_fb`
FROM `users`
WHERE (
`first_name` like ?
or `last_name` like ?
or concat(`first_name`, ' ', `last_name`) like ?
or `email` like ?)
AND `id` in('
.join(',',
array_map(function($e) { return (int) $e; }, $ids))
.')',
"%$search%", "%$search%", "%$search%", "$search")->result();