[codeigniter] subquery in codeigniter active record

It may be a little late for the original question but for future queries this might help. Best way to achieve this is Get the result of the inner query to an array like this

$this->db->select('id');
$result = $this->db->get('your_table');
return  $result->result_array();

And then use than array in the following active record clause

$this->db->where_not_in('id_of_another_table', 'previously_returned_array');

Hope this helps